Twilight paints sky smoky purple.
Grackles pepper this sheet of dusk
just above electric lines. Some
smear it with their shadow bodies.
The ones who land on wires shake
them as their toes grasp the tautness,
then space themselves like clothespins
on my mother’s clothesline adorned
with lacy socks, cutoff jean shorts,
t-shirts that read Sock it to me.
The irised colors of Quiscalus quiscula
cannot be seen against the darkening
sky—the bronze of their torsos, violet
of their wings, teal of heads. Rather,
they are as black as cables & the night
world outside of traffic lights, uncatchable
as a blur of clothes dancing on a line
of memory.
Taunja Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer. Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023, & she is co-author of Delight Is a Field (2025), published by Shanti Arts.